The Mozilla Manifesto: with great power comes great responsibility

Publishing a manifesto invites criticism, but that's okay?Mozilla can take ( …

"A win-win all over the place"

As an organization devoted to open-source projects, it's no surprise that the manifesto praises both the FOSS development model and argues for the importance of "decentralized participation worldwide" (principle six). And yet, by Mozilla's own estimates, 80 percent of the code that goes into the browser is contributed by those paid to work on the project. Have we found a spot at which Mozilla's ideals about decentralized, worldwide participation fail to live up to the current reality of its development practices?

Shaver argues that it's not so simple and that Mozilla is actually quite committed to principle six. "We don't see that as a failure to engage the community," he says. "These are, by and large, people who have come up through that community. One of the nice things about Firefox's success is that we've been able to pay more people to work on it, people who often were great contributors and worked on it part-time, and now they've finished school, and we can bring them in, and they can focus their energies on this, which they really want to do. It's a win-win all over the place."

He also points out that, although much of the core code is contributed by paid developers, Mozilla gets plenty of help from around the world in other ways. Up to 15,000 people download nightly builds, for instance, and test them for stability and performance problems, and plenty of people continue to submit small code changes. "The best little fixes come from people who have an itch to scratch," says Shaver. As an open-source project, Mozilla makes that itch-scratching possible.

A manifesto for the future

Conversation about the manifesto is ongoing in various project newsgroups, but no major changes are expected before v. 1.0 appears later this year. For Mozilla, which has been guided by the principles in the document for some time, little will change. "There wasn't really a precipitating event for the manifesto," says Shaver. "It's an asset that's important to us as we become bigger and more influential."

The manifesto is Mozilla's attempt to explain what it's up to and to convince others that it's a vision worth adopting for themselves. One of the goals for the manifesto is to "provide a framework for other people to advance this vision of the Internet"—a vision that sees the Internet as a valuable public resource, a place where commercial development is welcome but individual choice is paramount, and a world where standards and open development are the rule.

The manifesto has yet to play that role, but give it time. After all, Firefox v. 1.0 wasn't released until late in 2004, and it has made tremendous gains in less than three years. If market share trends continue to tilt in Mozilla's favor, its manifesto might gain in popularity along with its web browser. Or it might not.

Even if no one else adopts it, though, the principles will continue to guide Mozilla's development. By publishing the manifesto, Mozilla shows that it's serious about promoting "participation, accountability, and trust"; nothing invites criticism down the road like publishing a foundational document and then trying to apply that document to all the complexity of the real world. The fact that Mozilla wants to be called to account by its users is an excellent sign for the long-term health of the project.